No Ifs, Ands or Butts

How many times have you been "bombed" by the car driving in front of you when the driver chucks a lit cigarette out of the window?  It's almost enough to make me want to start wearing a helmet!  Every day we're fighting the War on Tobacco and its deadly byproducts.  Besides noxious first and second-hand smoke, billions of cigarette butts are added to the environment every year from the Earth's estimated 1.2 billion smokers.  These cigarette butts are composed of a plastic product called cellulose acetate, and the butts are estimated to take from 18 months to 12 years to biodegrade, depending on the environmental conditions of the locale in which they are discarded.  Besides being a source of litter, the discarded butt also contains various toxic chemicals, from nicotine to formaldehyde to arsenic to cyanide and many other dangerous byproducts of cigarette smoke.  If ingested, either by children or animals, the results could be deadly!

There are many things we can do to help prevent cigarette butt litter.  We could pick up the cigarette butts of others (or even those we ourselves produce), we could better educate smokers on how to properly dispose of their cigarette litter, provide more receptacles in public places for cigarette butts, have no smoking policies, etc.  Are you a smoker?  Then consider rolling your own, sans filter, like actor Johnny Depp does.   Even better, how about quitting?  States like New York and California have already banned smoking in bars and restaurants and have levied "sin taxes", which have made the cost of cigarettes prohibitive to many smokers.

Recently, the Rochester, New York-based Wegmans Supermarket chain (which has 71 stores in five states) is going to stop selling cigarettes beginning on February 10, 2008.  The CEO of the company, Danny Wegman and its President, his daughter Colleen, are doing this in the interest of public health, even to the detriment of the store's bottom line.  Not only is Wegmans not going to sell cigarettes, but it is also instituting a smoking cessation program for its employees.  Hopefully Wegman's noble action will influence other retailers to  cease their sale of these deadly products. 

Bravo Wegmans!  You get a BIG Green Sexy endorsement!